Hey Bright House, you suck (RANT MODE: ON)

My Internet connection here at home, which I rely on to do my work, has been experiencing constant outages for almost two weeks now (television service, too). The outages are becoming more frequent, and lasting longer. This issue is not affecting my entire neighborhood, but it is affecting my street and another street–both of which feed off the same node. Many of my neighbors have confirmed the exact same issues. Clearly the problem is with that node, but my provider, Bright House (TWC), just wants to send one technician after another to my home. YOU’VE BEEN TO MY HOME NUMERIOUS TIMES. MY WIRING IS FINE, YOU IGNORANT, LOW-TECH JACKASSES.

RANT++

I was on the phone with support during an outage (my neighbors were also experiencing an outage), and the support rep still couldn’t see that all the homes on a couple streets were totally out. This “technology” company not only doesn’t have the diagnostic tools to automatically determine when an issue is affecting more than one home, their support personnel can’t even see it when it’s happening in real time!

So I’ve been tethering off my cell phone, but I think a tower is out because my data connection has been spotty.

Thankfully one of my neighbors, who literally spent hours on the phone through THREE outages, finally got things moved up the chain a bit. Hopefully we’ll have a resolution today, because I can’t continue trying to work like this.

If I sound frustrated, it’s because I went through the same exact thing about 2 or 3 years ago, and it took almost a month and four crews traipsing through my house before they finally figured out the problem was with one of the local nodes.

With service like this, it’s no wonder that Bright House/Time Warner Cable was recently ranked the most hated company in America. Comcast was ranked just as bad, and so, in a sick sort of way, it’s almost comical that these two unholy behemoths very well may merge into a massive shitstorm of fail.

Presently there are no viable Internet alternatives available to me, however another company has been laying fiber in my neighborhood and preparing to rollout 1 Gb service. In fact, I think it’s already available in some sections of my neighborhood. I can’t wait to give Brighthouse the boot, and my middle finger.

It’s never good when you call for tech support and you CLEARLY know way more than the technical “expert”, which I am finding is the case more and more frequently. I would love to get ride of Brighthouse! I wonder if Jim Beyer has an economical solution?

LOL. My sentiments exactly. I went through similar problems a few years ago. BH knew what the problem was but couldn’t fix it. Dumbasses. It took me calling them almost every week and about six months for them to finally fix it. I hope they’re quicker with yours.

It’s a ashame you don’t have Verizon FiOS in your area. Their service has been rock solid for the last 5 years. Never had an outage only once or twice I had to reboot the router to get things working again.

I understand you completely, bro. I had THE EXACT same issue with Brighthouse about two months ago. It took them 3 weeks of sending out techs to replace my modem, even in spite of the fact that I know the modem was just fine.

Finally, I lost it. I demanded a tech show up with a helmet and a ladder to check the connection going into the house and if they didn’t show up with a helmet and ladder I wouldn’t let them in.

Also, I demanded they compensate me for the amount of data I consumed while tethering. I went off on Twitter, and a lady intercepted me and took care of the problem, compensating me two months in a row.

Looks like they finally fixed it (fingers crossed)! When I was out on my ride this morning I saw a BH truck at the node, and no outages since (normally I’d have had about 5 or 6 at this point in the day). While I’m glad it’s fixed, my complaints about BH’s terrible service stand. It’s insane that multiple customers have to spend so much time and energy attempting to get a problem resolved–especially since BH should have monitoring equipment in place that alerts engineers of trouble like this. So this issue took from August 18th until September 3rd to solve, and multiple trucks were rolled to about a dozen homes during that time, all for nothing. Hell, you’d think the cost of rolling those trucks would be enough incentive for BH to improve their monitoring infrastructure, even if they don’t care about their customers. I did get a credit which more than covered my cell phone data overage, but I had to ask for it.

I feel for your situation and have been through this with my own provider (another cable company). Once we had a electrical storm and went without Internet service for four straight days before they came out to replace the node that supported my home and several neighbors. Every time I have an outage and have to call in they want me to disconnect my wireless router, reboot the modem, check all of my connections but I ALREADY KNOW THAT IT’S THEIR PROBLEM OUTSIDE MY HOUSE!!! They keep wanting to send crews out to check the signal levels in the house but it’s never the problem.

I’m traveling through England where Wifi is everywhere, it’s fast and it’s cheap. I was even able to surf on the train from Stratford-upon-Avon to York. And don’t get me started on mobile phone services, I picked up a free SIM card and loaded it with a bunch of minutes, data and unlimited texting for about £15. All this to say that internet and wireless providers in our country are among the most expensive in the world but have worst service levels. It won’t get any better until we break up the monopoly hold they have on the market and bring in competing providers. If you had 3-4 providers to pick for broadband Internet service in your home I guarantee the service would be cheaper and better.

Looks like things are finally fixed. 24 hours without an outage. I wrote this on FB yesterday:

“It’s insane that multiple customers have to spend so much time and energy attempting to get a problem resolved–especially since BH should have monitoring equipment in place that alerts engineers of trouble like this. So this issue took from August 18th until September 3rd to solve, and multiple trucks were rolled to about a dozen homes during that time, all for nothing. Hell, you’d think the cost of rolling those trucks would be enough incentive for BH to improve their monitoring infrastructure, even if they don’t care about their customers.”

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